The Return of the Strong Gods
Thursday, September 24, 2026.
For several decades now, respectable folks were encouraged to believe that the future would be pleasantly weightless.
Religion would become private. Nations would become administrative districts.
Marriage would become a lifestyle option—or, increasingly, an ongoing negotiation.
Family obligations would be renegotiated according to preference, proximity, and whether anyone had recently used the word toxic.
We would travel lightly through the world, carrying little more than a passport, a résumé, and a carefully maintained set of boundaries to maintain our personal peace.
It sounded like freedom.
For a while, it even felt like freedom.
Then the strong gods came back.
They returned wearing campaign hats, carrying therapeutic vocabulary, sorting us into identities, causes, fandoms, tribes, and exquisitely specific forms of injury.
They returned because human beings can tolerate almost anything except the gnawing suspicion that there is nothing worth belonging to.
R. R. Reno gave this development its memorable name in his recent book, Return of the Strong Gods.
His argument was political and theological, but it reaches all the way down into the kitchen.
The strong gods are the commanding loves: faith, nation, family, truth, duty, sacrifice, home.
They are the things that do not merely ask what we prefer. They make claims on us.
We spent half a century weakening those claims.
Now we are discovering that a culture of endless permission does not remain gentle for long.
When the old loyalties collapse, souls do not become serene citizens of nowhere.
They go looking for something else that will tell them who they are—and whom to blame.
At which point St. Michael enters the argument and rather complicates the title of this blog post. St. Michael is currently enjoying a meme moment in the feed.
Michael is immensely strong. He appears in the Book of Daniel as a defender, in the Letter of Jude as an archangel, and in Revelation commanding the angels who drive the dragon from heaven.
He is usually depicted with a sword or spear, standing over something reptilian and unhappy. Catholic statuary is not always subtle.
Yet Michael’s name means Who is like God?
It is not really a request for suggestions.
The name is a rebuke to every creature tempted to mistake power for divinity.
Michael defeats the dragon without becoming another dragon.
His strength is not self-created, self-authorizing, or hungry for admiration. He fights under authority.
He protects what he did not create. He does not stand over the world shouting, “Who is like me?”
That may be the distinction our perilous present moment needs.
The answer to the weak gods is not simply the return of stronger gods.
Some of those gods have impressive uniforms, but malignant intentions.
The answer is rightly ordered strength: courage that knows whom it serves, authority that accepts judgment, and power exercised on behalf of something more vulnerable than itself.
The Weak Gods Were Not Entirely Wrong
The Western suspicion of strong loyalties did not arise from nowhere.
Europe had watched nation, race, ideology, and historical destiny become ravenous.
The strong gods had demanded bodies, and they had received them by the millions.
After the Second World War, political and cultural elites understandably became wary of thick borders, absolute truths, sacred obligations, and any sentence beginning with “A real patriot must...”
So the postwar West embraced what Reno calls the weak gods: openness, diversity, fluidity, choice, inclusion, nonjudgment, and the permanent loosening of inherited structures. We learned to distrust anything that bound too tightly.
This settlement accomplished concrete moral good.
It gave many people room to breathe. Women escaped roles that had been described as sacred largely because men found them convenient.
Gay folks ceased being treated as moral contamination.
Children became persons rather than family property. Marriages once preserved by terror could finally be left.
Any honest account of the strong gods must remember this. Some of these gods were not strong. They were brutal.
Some traditions were merely old injustices and privileges re-imagined.
But the weak gods had a problem of their own.
While they could liberate us from a bad inheritance. They could not tell us what deserved our devotion afterward.
Nobody Marries an Option
Marriage is where the limits of permanent openness become embarrassingly clear.
You may enter a relationship because it makes you happy.
You cannot sustain one if happiness remains the only court of appeal.
A marriage eventually asks questions consumer culture cannot answer:
Will you remain when another person becomes inconvenient?
Will you tell the truth when deception would protect your image?
Will you care for a body that no longer resembles the body you married?
Will you sacrifice without immediately producing an invoice?
Will you let a promise made by your younger self govern the appetites of your present self?
These are strong-god questions.
They make modern people nervous because they imply that something may have authority over the sovereign self.
Of course marriage must be freely chosen.
It must also be safe. A vow is not a permission slip for cruelty, coercion, abandonment, or domination.
No serious defense of commitment should be used to trap a life partner inside abuse.
But after safety comes demand.
A good marriage does not simply affirm two partners exactly as they are.It asks each of them to become more truthful, more disciplined, more generous, and less enchanted with the theater of personal innocence.
Love offers refuge, but it also hands you hedge clippers.
This is why so much contemporary relationship advice feels strangely malnourished.
It has a magnificent vocabulary for boundaries and a somewhat smaller vocabulary for duty.
It knows how to enthusiastically identify what we should never tolerate.
It is less articulate about meaningful suffering—what we might willingly endure for the sake of becoming capable of love.
We have become very good at asking whether a relationship serves us.
The stronger question is whether we are serving anything of higher purpose together.
The Strong Gods Found Us Anyway
Human beings do not remain unbound. We simply transfer our worship.
When religion weakens, politics often begins offering salvation.
When neighborhoods dissolve, online tribes provide belonging.
When families lose authority, personal identity becomes a more sacred territory.
When shared moral language disappears, therapy is asked to explain not only why we suffer but what suffering means.
This is too much work for therapy.
Therapy can help us recognize trauma, regulate emotion, revise destructive patterns, and speak more honestly.
It can help a couple stop injuring each other.
But it cannot manufacture a shared highest good from communication techniques.
No amount of reflective listening can answer the question, “What is our marriage for?”
That is one reason a culture can become over-explained and under-moved: fluent in the origin of every feeling, but unable to decide what any feeling must answer to.
The Power of Awe
Couples who cannot answer that question often turn every disagreement into litigation.
A marriage usually needs something larger than itself—faith, family, shared project, legacy, moral tradition, common future, or some other higher good with legitimate authority.
Without it, the only remaining question is whose preference wins.
The household becomes a tiny open society with two appellate courts and no constitution.
This is culturally exhausting.
The return of the strong gods is partly a revolt against that exhaustion.
Folks are hungry for vows, borders, rituals, obligations, and truths that do not dissolve the moment they start to pinch.
They want something solid enough to lean against.
Unfortunately, a hungry soul is not always a discriminating diner.
St. Michael Is Not the Patron Saint of Being Furious Online
Our contemporary spiritual imagination likes Michael because he has a sword.
We are somewhat less interested in the fact that he is obedient.
This is a recurring human preference.
We enjoy the dramatic equipment of holiness while quietly misplacing the holiness.
We want David’s sling, Joan of Arc’s banner, Michael’s armor, and perhaps a tasteful mug bearing the Latin version of something combative.
What we do not necessarily want is submission to God, discipline of appetite, protection of the weak, or the humiliating possibility that our enemy may not be the person we have been posting about.
Michael’s strength is pious strength. That does not mean sentimental strength.
In Revelation, he does not facilitate a dialogue circle with the dragon.
Evil is real, it is predatory, and it must be resisted.
Christianity is not the belief that everything unpleasant can be resolved by using a softer tone. The notion of a crusade is self-evident.
But Michael does not fight for his personal brand.
He is not offended on his own behalf.
He does not need the dragon in order to feel important.
His authority comes from beyond himself, and therefore his power has limits, direction, and purpose.
This is the difference between strength and domination.
Domination says: I am strong, therefore I should rule.
Michael says: God is God, therefore I know where to stand.
That posture is neither weak nor theatrical. It is the humility of a creature who has no confusion about the chain of command.
Some Gods Eat Their Worshippers
The danger is not that the strong gods are returning.
The danger is that we have lost the moral formation required to distinguish a worthy authority from an idol.
A nation can become a shared home, or it can become an excuse for contempt.
Religion can teach humility before God, or it can dress human vanity in vestments.
Family loyalty can cultivate responsibility, or it can protect predators and call the silence respect.
Marriage can become a school of love, or a private monarchy with poor labor laws
.
The test of a strong god is not simply whether it binds people together. A lynch mob is bound together. So is a cult.
The better test is what kind of soul the loyalty produces.
Does it deepen courage without requiring cruelty?
Does it create solidarity without manufacturing an enemy?
Does it ask for sacrifice from leaders as well as followers?
Does it tell the truth about its own failures?
Does it protect the weak when doing so is expensive?
Does it permit repentance?
A false god always needs someone else on the sacrificial altar.
St. Michael offers another test: does the authority know that it is not God?
This question belongs in churches, governments, families, and marriages.
It belongs in the therapist’s office too.
Many relational disasters begin when an ordinary human preference acquires divine status.
One partner’s anxiety becomes household law.
Another partner’s autonomy becomes the supreme good.
A wound becomes an identity, an identity becomes an exemption, and soon everyone is genuflecting before something that was supposed to be healed.
Even justified grievance can become the hell of the just: a morally airtight room with no door.
The Michaelic question—Who is like God?—restores proportion.
Not my fear. Not your anger. Not the marriage. Not the therapist. Not the nation.
None of these can bear the moral weight we place upon them when we ask them to become ultimate.
Piety is not pretending human institutions are divine. Piety is loving them in the right order.
Augustine understood this as ordo amoris—the order of loves. I have written elsewhere about its danger: ordered love can harden into a theological ledger, with powerful people helpfully explaining why everyone beneath them owes more.
That criticism stands.
Any supposed order of love that protects status more reliably than persons has probably confused divine order with excellent seating arrangements.
But the abuse of order does not abolish the need for it. Our trouble is not merely that we love bad things.
More often, we love good things badly: country above truth, family above justice, peace above honesty, marriage above the personhood of the married.
Even the self, which must be treated with dignity, becomes destructive when promoted from creature to deity. The moral life is therefore not an evacuation of love but its arrangement. God first; everything else loved truly because it is no longer being asked to be God.
Begin With the Nearest Obligations
There is something grandiose about trying to save Western civilization before learning how to apologize to your wife.
The renewal of shared life will not begin with a perfect political program.
It will begin much closer to home: keeping promises, caring for aging parents, raising children who are not merely optimized, showing up for worship, knowing the neighbors, telling the truth when lying would be profitable, and remaining available when a friend’s suffering has become repetitive and badly timed.
These are not glamorous acts.
No one makes a documentary about the man who drives his wife to chemotherapy and remembers where she likes to stop for coffee.
But civilization is mostly made of such things.
The strongest loyalties are often quiet.
They appear as steadiness when departure would be easier, betrayal would be rewarding, and nobody important is watching.
This is especially true in marriage. When marriage recovers sacred regard, the most serious vow is not “You make me happy.” It is closer to: Your life will not be witnessed alone.
That promise is strong enough to organize a household and gentle enough not to become a prison. It acknowledges duty without denying personhood. It allows love to be more than a mood while refusing to make endurance the supreme virtue.
There is something of St. Michael in this kind of love.
I will not worship you. I will not permit you to worship me.
I will not confuse your fear with God’s command or my desire with moral law.
But I will stand with you against what seeks to destroy what is good between us.
I will tell the truth. I will protect without possessing. I will remain answerable to a good higher than either of us.
This is not romantic love as contemporary culture usually markets it. It is shared guardianship of the covenant—not guardianship over another adult, but two people willing to stand at the gate.
We Cannot Live on Liberation Alone
The weak gods taught us something indispensable: institutions must answer for the harm they do. Authority is not self-justifying.
Tradition must be examined. No loyalty deserves a human sacrifice merely because it has been around for a long time.
But liberation is a door, not a dwelling.
Eventually we must decide what freedom is for.
We need loves stronger than preference but less ravenous than ideology. We need homes, congregations, friendships, marriages, and communities that can say both you belong here and something is required of you here.
The strong gods are returning because the human heart was never designed for permanent optionality—or for the meaning recession that follows when nothing is permitted to make a claim upon us.
The question is not whether we will serve something larger than ourselves. We already do. The question is whether what we serve will make us more human—or merely make us feel powerful.
This is why the internet meme of St. Michael matters now.
He is not a mascot for rage, masculinity, nationalism, or our suspicion that everyone else has become corrupt.
He is the icon of strength that refuses idolatry.
His very name places a question mark over every throne, every movement, every charismatic leader, every righteous fury, and every private grievance that has begun demanding sacrifices.
Who is like God?
No politician. No nation. No ideology. No spouse. No therapist. No self.
That answer purifies our loyalties. We may love our country without asking it to save our souls, honor marriage without turning it into captivity, cherish family without concealing its sins, and seek justice without developing an appetite for enemies.
And when evil is real—when cruelty, deception, addiction, exploitation, or despair enters the household—we do not have to call it complexity because confrontation feels impolite.
We may stand.
We may resist.
We may even ask for heavenly help.
Yes, the strong gods have returned.
Some deserve our loyalty. Some deserve our suspicion. A few deserve to be driven out.
St. Michael reminds us how to tell the difference: true strength bows upward, protects downward, and does not gaze too longingly at its own sword.
Why Work With Daniel?
Couples rarely come to therapy because they have no feelings.
They come because feeling has become the only authority either partner recognizes.
Every hurt becomes a verdict. Every preference becomes a principle.
Every disappointment begins to sound like evidence that the marriage itself was a mistake.
My work helps couples recover something stronger than emotional weather: a safe, truthful, demanding partnership organized around shared values.
That does not mean preserving every marriage at any cost. It means discovering whether two life partners can build a bond that protects their personhood while asking more of both of them.
If your marriage has become a negotiation between two exhausted sovereign states, we should talk.
Schedule a free introductory call.
Further Reading
R. R. Reno, “Return of the Strong Gods”, First Things.
R. R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West (Regnery Gateway, 2019).
Augustine, The City of God, Book XV, Chapter 22, on virtue as the right ordering of love.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed